White House Says Iraq Has WMD Russia Created Cyberattack Moon of Alabama. What I can’t figure out is why we don’t have our war already, whether in North Korea, the Middle East, or Ukraine, since our elites clearly want one so desperately (I don’t mean pissant wars like Afghanistan; I mean a real war, with tanks ‘n’ stuff, and embedded “reporters”).

WaPo Op-Ed Columnist Megan McArdle Wants Kids to ‘Gang Rush Shooters’ Law and Crime. There is also, I kid you not, a DHS “Active Shooter Card.” I’m trying to think of a work of a dystopian fiction that includes versimilitude like that card, and I can’t come up with one. Oh, and this bit: “Contact your [1]building management or [2]human resources department for more information and [3]training on active shooter response in your workplace.” I’ve helpfully numbered the opportunities for increased staffing and funding. Not that I’m bitter or cynical.

U.S. Democrats push $1 billion bill for election security Reuters (E. Mayer). E. Mayer: “Virtue-signalers gotta virtue-signal, and grifters gotta grift. And I love the fait-accompli narrative that pretends the Russian 2016 election hacking/influencing allegations are proven: ‘The measure followed warnings on Tuesday from U.S. intelligence officials that midterm races in November are likely to see renewed meddling from Russia and possibly other foreign adversaries.'” And naturally no mention of hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public. To be fair to all the stakeholders, you can’t create a self-licking ice cream cone with a solution that actually works.

About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered.
To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

You’re right, Christian Conservatives are a lost cause. They have no idea how hollow their thundering moral proclamations sound, when their standard bearer is caught over and over again with his pants down around his ankles. Maybe if Christian Conservatives weren’t trying so hard to subjugate women, it would be easier to laugh off President Mulligan’s sex-life.

They’re not wrong to blow it off. He’s giving them what they want on policy, more or less.

If Trump gave us Medicare for All, $15/hr min wage, ended the wars, municipal broadband, etc….I’d vote to put his @$$ on Mt. Rushmore and I wouldn’t care if he got a revolving door installed in the Lincoln bedroom and had a line of hookers winding out the door on a weekly basis. He can do a Wilt Chamberlain impression for all I care and go for 10K.

Policy, policy, policy…..it’s all that ever matters…the rest is just for show.

Subjugating women is one of the most powerful tools in their arsenal. Look at all the women who supported Roy Moore, and those who said it is normal in evangelical circles to “groom” wives from an early age–i.e. underage. Women are limited to a circumscribed role, and that does not include the right to refuse a man anything. It is part of their values, and they are not going to be ashamed of treating women like objects put on Earth to please men.

Meh. Mittens doesn’t really bother me. If elected he’s only be the 20 or 25th most noxious person in the senate. Look on the bright side: Based on his history at Bain, maybe he’ll do a LBO of the upper chamber, load them up with debt and they’ll have to lay off three-quarters of the other senators.

Besides, he’s 71. He only has another 7 or 8 terms left in him before he dies (or buys another house somewhere and decides he wants to be governor of that state instead).

Just as it is very easy for our political and media elite to promote military misadventures where their kids will never be cannon fodder, now they can volunteer other people’s children to force the gunman to use all their ammunition.

This is not the first time that I have heard media people suggest rushing a gunman in a school as it happened not a long after another school shooting. So I have a proposal. Gather those who think that it is a good idea like Megan McArdle and take them to a set of rooms. Give each of these people a plastic face mask to protect their eyes and teeth with. Then tell them to take down a nearby shooter. That shooter will have a paintball gun and he will proceed to use it on either semi-auto or automatic to hunt these people down. Those paint ball pellets only have a muzzle velocity of 300 feet per second which will sting a bit (I know) but not, like, kill them. The paint splashes will show everybody the results if that had been a real rifle. Televise the whole damn thing so that they cannot make up some cock and bull story how they actually ‘won’ it too. Then take them to a firing range and show them what a real rifle can do in terms of damage.

Or rather, sometimes German machine gun nests were rushed, and with predictable results.

While the average frustrated active school shooter doesn’t have a fully automatic belt-fed weapon, the average frustrated schoolkid doesn’t have the individual, much less collective, situational awareness to make a move like that.

McCardle’s plan like a real armchair general move, the equivalent of “why not just shoot the gun out of his hand like in the old cowboy TV shows?” Or, as Mr. Michael Tyson put it “Everyone has a plan – until they get punched in the face.”

So she just ignores that the choice is between dying easily or attempting to mitigate the damage the shooter can do by overwhelming him with victims quickly.

Or is it more important that she ignore that the shooter shouldn’t have the means to take out dozens of people in a matter of seconds because an industry was allowed to illegally lobby and propagandize a situation that warped a constitution right far beyond what it was ever meant to be. And that the only way of dealing with the dangers this warped situation has created is allowing our populace to be fodder for shooters on a regular basis, and all defense is well “you are going to die anyway so do not die quietly…”

Personally I don’t want any more advocacy for more guns and training to counteract this problem. Instead it is time for those ‘teaching’ to do. IOW, it is long past time for the backers of the NRA and their well paid mouth pieces like McArdle to rush the shooters themselves.

I am not advocating for more guns. In fact I believe there are many solutions to this problem that our politicians and the NRA refuse to address.

My point, and what caught my attention, was the comparison of soldiers attacking machine gun nests to mass shootings of unprepared civilians by the insane.

Kalmbacher and McArdle have both done a serious (criminal in my opinion) disservice to these horrible situations.

Until the situation is rectified, slamming the DHS as being brain-dead for giving good advice for a horrible situation is as bad as those who believe that McArdle’s advice has any value whatsoever.

Until the gun situation is rectified, and not taking Step Three out of context, the advice is this:

1) Run

if you can’t do this,

2) Hide

if that doesn’t work,

3) Fight

For a soldier in the battlefield, reverse the above… or face either prison or a firing squad.

My comment is in the context of the article only, not meant to be in the context of the controversy over the Second Amendment, and until the situation is rectified on a National level, the DHS advice is good advice. Hopefully the time will come when this advice will be a footnote in history.

I’m sorry if you misunderstood me. I didn’t care what the DHS advice was. They are constrained in a manner that McArdle is not. They really are not in a position to go:

FIRST – you should not have such free access to guns and ammunition that X person who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place has access to an automatic weapon that can fire off dozens of bullets a minute and the ammunition to do it. BUT…

McArdle not only is not constrained in this manner she is not only advocating for not doing something to solve one of the base issues in this matter, but to provide more dead bodies for every shooter.

The DHS advice is not the problem, the use of it to propagandize bad ideas is. AND that is all McArdle.

Understand your point, but it’s academic. Unless the Active Shooter Card is torso-sized and made of kevlar, then it, like McArdle’s suggestion, is just weak (shooter card) and ironic (McArdle) advice for likely future victims, while the root of the problem remains unaddressed.

Is she “not too bright”? To me she sounds like she is just doing what high-profile, controversial op-ed new hires do: spout obviously venal bs in a way that brings in clicks and eyeballs.

Bret Stephens did the same thing right out the gate at the New York Times with his initial climate change column. The key trick is to be ‘edgy’ enough to enrage the left edge of the readership without getting summarily fired. I.e. you can’t be a young no-name and pal around with internet neo-Nazis. You have to have name recognition and age on your side.

McArdle would never publish a thought, view or ‘opinion’ unless it promoted her brand. She makes bank off these kinds of offenses.

Also, the women at the school who heard unusual noises and went into the hall saw what was happening and immeidate shouted to warn other teachers that there was a shooter. Two of the women were killed and one wounded twice and managed to stay still until Adam Lanza moved on to find others to shoot.

Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach were meeting with other faculty members when they heard, but did not recognize, gunshots. Hochsprung, Sherlach, and lead teacher Natalie Hammond went into the hall to determine the source of the sounds and encountered Lanza. A faculty member who was at the meeting said that the three women called out “Shooter! Stay put!” which alerted their colleagues to the danger and saved their lives.[38] An aide heard gunshots. A teacher hiding in the math lab heard school janitor Rick Thorne yell, “Put the gun down!” (Thorne survived.)[39] Lanza killed both Hochsprung and Sherlach.[40] Hammond was hit first in the leg, and then sustained another gunshot wound. She lay still in the hallway and then, not hearing any more noise, crawled back to the conference room and pressed her body against the door to keep it closed.[41] She was later treated at Danbury Hospital.

New gym exercise! Practice rushing and stomping on some other student. Sort of like dodge-ball that we used to play before that was banned because kids got, you know, hurt. How to best use your sharpened pencil (go for the base of the skull, or eyes.) A new competitive sport-like activity with prizes and stuff for the most savage and aggressive student, not entirely different from football but without the ball or pads or helmets or any of that other sissy stuff. And while the coach is at it, she can teach girls how to defend themselves from physical attack: knees, groin, throat, eyes in ascending order.

Uhhh, no. They have been having trouble for years now so here are a few data points. During a NATO exercise German troops were forced to use broomsticks instead of machine guns due to equipment shortages. All its submarines are currently non-operational which is the first time ever. A German defense official stated recently that the Navy is running out of deployment-capable ships for all the missions assigned to it. It has had to outsource helicopter training to a private company as its own helicopters are in need of repair. A Bundeswehr mission in Mali had half its vehicles knocked out by the climate which may be because their vehicles were design for use in Europe. German reconnaissance jets couldn’t fly at night because the cockpit lights are too bright. In 2015 only 66 of the air force’s 93 fighters were operational but only 29 of them were combat ready. Due to lack of spare parts and high maintenance costs Germany has only 9 out of 44 tanks combat-ready in one brigade and last December they had only 95 out of 244 Leopard 2 main battle tanks ready altogether.
RT had a story on the German Army (https://www.rt.com/news/417641-what-is-wrong-german-army/) recently but I am going to take my own guess. In my many visits to Germany back in the 80s you often saw the Bundeswehr about and all men had to serve in it – either that or work in a hospital or the like. Now it is a volunteer army but the trouble is that, like the US military, the politicians keep on finding new missions and new commitments for an army that was actually built to defend Germany itself. Trump is demanding that Germany spend more money on the German military by which he means buying American weapons systems along with the servicing contracts such weapons involve. Trouble is that that does nothing for the rest of the force that is being run down and any new US weapons systems would drain more resources from the rest of the German military. Time for the German military to take a “pausa” and increase some spending but only on the core basics first.

“But when it comes to funding, the NRA may have finally gone too far: the FBI recently launched an investigation to determine whether a Russian central banker, and Putin ally, illegally funneled money through the organization to help the Trump campaign….Although much of the reporting on Russia has focused on whether there was “collusion” with the Trump campaign — a genuine concern — the investigation is also revealing another disquieting reality: that American democracy has a money laundering problem.”
“The NRA is among the largest “dark money” organizations, reporting the greatest amount of campaign spending without revealing the source of the funds — over $35 million in the 2016 election cycle alone.”

A German defense official stated recently that the Navy is running out of deployment-capable ships for all the missions assigned to it.

The German navy has also just rejected the delivery of the new frigates built to replace its aging warships — after they flunked their sea trials because of under-performing engines, the control (radars, sonars, etc) and arms systems not working together, and the whole ship consistently listing to starboard… Failed ship architecture, failed power design, failed systems integration.

Corporate bond investors finally joined a selloff that has shaken stocks to Treasuries as investors spooked by U.S. interest-rate risk headed for the exits.

Investors pulled $14.1 billion from debt funds according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report. High-yield bonds lost $10.9 billion alone, the second highest outflow on record. As benchmark Treasury yields traded at a four-year high, it shook the foundations of a key support for risk assets — low rates.

“Investors don’t sell their cash bonds in a big way until they are forced to, which happens when the outflows start picking up more sustainably,” Morgan Stanley wrote in a recent note to clients.

What frayed-collar journos never tell you is that big outflows from stocks and bond funds typically have a contrarian implication: when the public is spooked and selling (egged on by the MSM) usually you can back up the truck and pile in mountains of the cast-off asset class with a Bobcat and a forklift.

My junk vs Treasuries switching model still unambiguously prefers junk. If you take financial advice from the MSM (which simply amplifies the popular mood; thus the contrarian value of headlines and magazine covers) you will lose everything.

Last Friday a dead-tree edition of the NYT in the supermarket featured a bold-headlined lead story about the volmageddon selloff. “Duh, that means it’s over,” I remarked to a companion. Thanks, MSM!

“Priebus soon became a target of Trump’s ritual belittling as the president took to referring to him as “Reincey.” At one point, he summoned Priebus—to swat a fly. Priebus seemed to have been willing to endure almost any indignity to stay in Trump’s favor.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, to have been that fly on the wall, listening in.

What we have is another mentally ill person, stigmatized by peers and teachers, alienated from society by being kicked out of school, untreated, without care or follow up.

He was seen only as a threat because people only heard his words. What happened was not evil, it was a biological response. He was asking to be cared for in a language that takes compassion and patience to understand. No one was listening.

Both Republicans and Democrats still do not want to care for the mentally ill, instead, they want to make them “illegal people” and not let buy guns instead of seeing the mental illness shared by the people who think we need guns. They want to marginalize them, further. Stigmatize them again.

Banning guns solves the problem of people getting killed but the mental illness is free to flourish. Don’t you see that the gun and the violence was the only language this man had left? No one was listening to him. So he screamed.

Guns are used by people who do not have a voice in society. That is why they are used by revolutionaries, by the poor, and that is why many Trump supporters want to have guns. Neo-liberals want to just take the guns away and let Mr. Market figure out what to do about the mentally ill. Hillary calling Trump supporters “deplorables” is the perfect example that she does not listen. Trump, he does not even pretend he is listening. Guns are symbolic, and we need to listen to what that symbol is telling us.

Mental illness is a society that does not listen and care for the sick and suffering, it is a society that values the self over the community.

So I say do not focus on taking away the guns, focus on making it so that everyone in society does not feel so threatened and unheard that they need a gun. That starts by listening and ends in transforming society.

This is just ignorant. I’ve been stigmatised for my entire adult life for having a mental illness. No one will listen to you. The people who are supposed to help like the shrinks and other mental health professionals just want to drug you into a unfeeling zombie and the supposed progressives want the same. Race has nothing to do with it. If i didn’t have the support of my family and friends i could easily see myself getting angry enough to do something stupid.

This is a complex thing to talk about, and very individual. While it is very wrong for families and communities to punish a person with these difficulties, I can tell you that a member of my family, terrified of being homeless, threatened my life if I did not sign my house over to him, and refused to take medication to stop his other drug use and psychotic episodes. I was providing a place for him to live and living with his ups and downs, but he was not doing his part to live in a way that did not frighten everyone around him. His illness seemed to be an entity in itself and bent on destruction of everything around him. He said the voices told him to do things, and I pointed out that he did not have to do those things, just because the voices told him to (this did make him think for a minute). I became frightened of him, and could not continue to have him in my home because he threatened the safety of our elderly parents and myself. It’s a two-way street.

My father wanted to keep him at home, and moved out with my mother to an apartment so that my brother could live with them. He beat my 78-year-old father bloody soon after that, because he said he hated my father’s voice. Then he was committed with my father’s consent. My point is that he needed structure of a mental facility, which some here I think are calling stigmatizing. I had tried to get him to stay in a good facility before this happened. His illness was not rational–reducing stress was a matter of opinion with him. You are right though–appropriate housing is desperately needed, but he had to accept help that was ultimately going to interfere with his psychotic behavior. He thought it was working for him, so he did not want to change.

Here’s King Andy, who can’t say anything about his ‘alleged’ corruption (at the end), but can say a lot about his lists, listicles, and his long career of failing upward that has lead him to the head of NYS and national politics.

I don’t know, this seems confused. It seems to me that making a point about shooters like this being “mentally ill” stigmatizes those with an actual “mental illness” diagnosis, who I have heard are actually less violent than the general populace. And how do we even know that the shooter was indeed mentally ill? Because they shot people? If we are going to use self-referencing definitions like that let’s not pretend that the “mentally ill” diagnosis BY ITSELF isn’t stigmatizing.

And it’s one thing to say this society creates a lot of pain, but the guy seems to have been a deranged human being as well torturing animals etc.. I mean really truly there seems to have been more wrong with him than just being a social outcast in a dead end social role even if a better society wouldn’t create such roles at all, and I agree that a decent society wouldn’t.

I agree with much of what you wrote. “No one was listening so he screamed.” But another factor is being overlooked, or buried in the articles about the kid. He lost both of his adopted parents recently. This event coupled with all the rest, the school bullying, the depression, etc etc, obviously could have caused this rage. Also, look at the pictures of his face. I see a kid with a blank expression. Not angry, not confused, not broken. Blank. And he went to get a soda and to McD’s after the shooting. What the heck is that? It truly baffles me.

Whoa! That’s very well stated, and I’d guess true in many (but not all), possibly most cases. The wealthy and influential can own guns, too. But that’s a great insight about the symbolic values of guns to the voiceless and dispossessed. I’ve observed this phenomena myself, but this clarifies things. Democrats: listen up!

Would it be possible to start a giant class action law suit against the NRA, gun manufactures and congress criters that have taken money from the gun industry? I think a large number of citizens would join in. Why hasn’t think been considered?

Camus’ “The Rebel,” deals quite well with the early stages of the social pact’s dissolution.

“The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

Amid the ritual offering of thoughts and prayers for the latest victims of gun violence, here’s something members of Congress can do that will not limit the distribution of guns nor infringe on perceived freedoms contained within the Second Amendment.

They can, and should without delay, lift the 20-year-old ban on federal research on gun violence.
……
House Speaker Paul Ryan relied on the dearth of research again on Thursday in cautioning against a rush to action. “This is not the time to jump to some conclusion, not knowing the full facts,” he said. “We have a system to prevent people who aren’t supposed to get guns from getting guns. And if there are gaps there, then we need to look at those gaps.”
=======================================================
Why do Americans shoot their fellow Americans……because they can?

@fresno dan
February 16, 2018 at 8:37 am
——
Yes, there was recent legislation that revoked the requirement that Social Security report to the background check system (NICS) those who receive Social Security Disability benefits for mental health issues. This was done through the Congressional Review Act that prohibits any similar regulation from being imposed without new legislation.

I honestly believe that the elites will be just as happy if we kill each other off. They seem to be doing everything they can to make life as difficult as possible for the working class and everyone else not in the top 10% or so. The increasing “deaths from despair” is the logical result of these efforts.

Besides, these mass shootings take up big chunks of the news cycle allowing those in power to carry out their agenda while we are distracted by the “bread and circuses”.

One of the reason these shootings make headlines is that they typically occur in suburban schools with many parents in the top 10%. It comes as a real shock because it is supposed to be the inner city where the bullets are flying.

My wife teaches in an inner city school. There is some violence but a mass shooting is less likely than in a suburban school for two reasons:

1. Many of the students are immigrants. They simply don’t participate in the bullying that is a hallmark for creating a mass shooter.
2. The students don’t have the money to go to the local gun store and buy lots of weapons and military gear with lots of magazines and bullets.

The kids are exposed to gunfire, but it is at home where drugs and gangs in their neighborhoods result in the gun violence.

Dear sir, I am one of those whackadoodles you speak of. And I agree with Trump. By making it illegal for me to buy a gun when I have no history of violence is making me illegal and it re-enforces the stigma of those of us with mood disorders and leads to people calling us whackadoodles.

I do not like guns, but we have a society that has no voice and some of them use guns to express their voice. I do not blame the gun only, or the person only, I blame society collectively. People who want to control others have only compassion for themselves.

And please, think about how you talk about people with mental health issues.

“And I agree with Trump. By making it illegal for me to buy a gun when I have no history of violence is making me illegal and it re-enforces the stigma of those of us with mood disorders and leads to people calling us whackadoodles.”

Croatoan: do you think you should be able to own a gun?
(what history of violence did Cruz have?)
You being stigmatized is not more important than me being alive. The only question is: who is more nuts, mentally ill people who believe they can own guns or a society that thinks mentally ill people can own guns…

President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning that neighbors and classmates should have reported 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz to authorities after he first exhibited disturbing behavior.

But many had done that — over and over and over again.

Cruz, accused of mowing down 17 people at his South Florida high school in one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, had been barred from bringing a backpack to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School because he was threatening other students and, after repeated disciplinary run-ins, was finally expelled last year.

Neighbors say he harassed them and police were called to his house many times, the Sun-Sentinel reported. He had also been receiving mental health treatment, but stopped going to the clinic sometime last fall, according to The Washington Post.

Yet despite the fact that he was well known to local police, school and mental health officials, he legally purchased the AR-15 that he used to gun down his former classmates. Cruz slipped through the gaps in a dysfunctional mental health system and a gun background check setup not designed to stop mentally ill people who haven’t been incarcerated or court-ordered into treatment.

I have no reason to own a gun because my compassion is greater than my fear of dying. I object to people want to turn me into an illegal person by a subjective medical diagnosis. I object to people taking away my rights based on cultural stories. You know, like what happened to blacks and gays.

“You being stigmatized is not more important than me being alive.”

You think I want to kill you? Have you been checked for an anxiety disorder or paranoid delusions? :) You know you could have a quick diagnosis and be on that list before you know it.

You are assigning a risk to me based on a statistic is no existent, and much lower than people who use drugs and alcohol. Yes, people who use did are more likely to be violent.

Why aren’t you proposing drug tests for gun owners?

I am saying they should not let violent people buy guns. Saying that the mentally I’ll should not be allowed to buy guys stigmatizes because it equates violence with mental illness.

But you agree with me, no one cared about him. Isn’t that the fundamental problem?

We look at this one horrific act and we miss all the small ones done by neurotypical people everyday. That is no way to make policy.

I agree there doesn’t seem much evidence people diagnosed with “mental illness” owning guns is more dangerous than anyone else owning guns (the proliferation of guns issue is a separate issue than targeting those with “mental illness” diagnoses for special legal treatment). Still though if we can’t use words from psychology to describe the guy “sick”, “sadistic” etc. then we will have to use moralistic words and call him one bad dude. Not just for the shooting but because the guy enjoyed animal cruelty as well.

Legally, the mentally ill cannot own guns, already. Last time I purchased a firearm (a shotgun in 1990 fwiw) the very first question on the FFL paperwork was regarding mental stability. I’m willing to bet that more than a few people have lied on the FFL forms which carries a max penalty of 5 years or $250,000 last I checked.

Florida has always been a bit of a “free access” nutcase tho, similar to Texas.

People who want to control others have only compassion for themselves.

Are you in favor of the voiceless using guns to control others–i.e., deciding to kick them off the planet, just because “society collectively” failed them? Pardon me, but that sounds a little whacky to me. Making “society collectively” responsible obviates personal accountability–a common thing these days. That’s no excuse for taking another’s life.

System selects for psychopathy, on purpose.
for all those years, 1. the profession of Psyche was abused by militarists and spooks, and moralists and essentially, eugenecists, and this necessarily lessened the legitimacy of the profession(lesson: stay out of bed with CIA, et alia)…and 2. at the same time, not only was Reagan(as Goob) undercutting the idea of Psyche(due to #1:Commie Mind Control”)), but the rising Theocratic Wing of Gop was against it tooth and nail in the South(“that’s what church is for”), so it has been consistantly defunded and derided(MHMR in Texas may as well not exist outside of big cities, and even there, it’s a travesty)
so in the south as a whole and especially within the intercity no man’s land(“The Country”) There is little to no mental health(for lower midclass, poor), and if a therapist opened up shop where I live, I doubt they’d be there for long(no market/percived need & at least tacit hostility)
a few teachers, here, were overheard telling each other after the shooting that “nobody wants to talk about mental illness, because the dems want to disarm us”(!!?). It’s as if they were casually painting the wall red, while yammering that they hate how the wall is always red.
In my ongoing, randomly conducted, totally unscientific polling/eavesdropping out here, a lot of these folks would have no problem with the idea of Mental Health Services, better background checks and other “big gov” type things, but they fear the all powerful Democratic Machine(??!). When pressed, they might be ok with one of theirs actually doing some gun control scheme.(I was shocked by all this, as well)
As with so many things on the feral American Right,they have to come to it on their own, or with (what they think is) one of their own leading them.((they’d be interested in a Const Amd. that codified the Right to Vote, for instance)
But you can’t talk to them as a democrat(etc).
I saw that Max Boot wants gun control,lol.
and Ordinary Republicans are talking about mental health(!!).
The Frameworks that we apply to Reality are broken.
Wish we could better take advantage of the disarray.

I am running for United States Senate to serve the people of Utah and bring Utah’s values to Washington.
8:19 AM – Feb 16, 2018

We learnt what “Utah’s values” were last Friday when all four members of its House delegation voted for the egregious borrow-and-spend two-year budget deal.

Utah’s “mortgage the beehive” values would be best dramatized by dressing up in harlequin suit and tossing a pile of hundred-dollar bills into a fan to blow into a raging fire, as a claque of trained seals clap their flippers and go ork ork ork.

Romney is like Jason from the Friday 13th horror series. You simply cannot get rid of him. Romney has a nice family and lots of money. One would think that he would retire, enjoy life, and stop inflicting himself upon the public.

Both parties are infested with zombies: Pelosi, Romney, Stenny Hoyer and others. Storm [sic] Thurmond and Robert Byrd were in the Senate for what seemed like centuries. It’s almost a horror movie.

msnbs is referring to mittens as “the favorite.” I’d say carpetbagger, but, apparently, he’s not even bothering with the bag.

A friend that runs a sightseeing tour in the NP was over yesterday, and primarily gets out of state and overseas visitors, and was telling me that every last tourist from out of the country asks him about all the homeless they saw in SD/OC/LA/SF and were amazed by the extent of it.

I live in CA, and I’ve been immersed in the homeless situation here in various cities and towns, and I’m still amazed by the extent of it. The most aggravating thing, of course, is how almost NOTHING is being done to mitigate the situation in any way. Literally DECADES of the CA State, plus various local govts basically kicking the can down the road and “criminalizing” homelessness and mental illness.

It’s disgusting.

I have a good cynical laugh when friends of mine say that they simply cannot travel to places like India because of the poverty and homelessness there. I always say: what do you do when you walk out of your front door? Put on a blind fold?

Sheesh. I’ve lived in India. It’s almost worse here bc we provide NO drinking fountains, no bathrooms, no sinks, no nothing. Lots of defacation in the streets which has led to Hepatitis epidemics this year.

In Santa Monica before the turn of the century, they’d feed the homeless in front of the Rand building which lured all comers from hither to yon & beyond, and it was one of the few places that you’d see people living like that in a city in SoCal.

We visited Portland over the Holidays, two years ago. The Central Library at closing time was a dystopian scene of streams of homeless people shuffling out the door to ….. where? An overpass or alley? It was certainly too late in the evening to head to an official shelter.

Now, in Seattle, homeless folk are everywhere. A few discrete tents in a sheltered corner by Green Lake; one man endlessly circles the lake pushing a shopping cart festooned with Target plastic bags. 115th Street, between Aurora and UW’s Northwest Hospital campus, is lined with cars and campers; the lucky ones that still have a vehicle and some place to park it. The inhabitants of the cemetery don’t hassle them.

Blessed be the public libraries and the librarians; the reading rooms during this rainy season are filled with the homeless, using the computers, reading, not-sleeping, as this is frowned upon. They are quiet, resigned, beaten down by their situation.

In the quiet-before-the-storm that we are discussing in Yves post this morning, commenters are wondering how long and how bad the ‘slide’ has to become before there is a rupture. I think of society as balancing at the ‘angle of repose,’ the steepest angle at which a slope, formed of a mass of loose material, is stable. At that angle, additional material will destabilize the ground and stuff starts rolling downhill. What additional homeless person, which new child gunned down at school, which revelation of a government official lining her pockets in total disdain for the public good, will be the grain of sand that starts the landslide. Which exorbitant 15,000 sq ft house or personal jet purchased or multi-million dollar birthday party for 1000 closest friends, which sick person denied compensation by his health insurance company, which forty-year old, burdened still by student loans, house mortgage and credit card debt, with job outsourced, will be the tiny pebble that sets off the roaring avalanche.

That is what so many of us are waiting for, breathless in horrified anticipation.

We’ve come so far so fast from being self-sufficient to turning into shelf-efficient…

…and when they took out one more lump of coal from the hollowed out understory of Turtle Mountain, did the Frank Slide get going 115 years ago, there was no stopping 90 million tons of limestone for 100 seconds when shift happened

My mom was born in Bellevue, Ab., down the road a piece from where the rockalanche occurred.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Frank Slide was a rockslide that buried part of the mining town of Frank, Northwest Territories, Canada at 4:10 am on April 29, 1903. Over 82 million tonnes (90 million tons) of limestone rock slid down Turtle Mountain within 100 seconds, obliterating the eastern edge of Frank, the Canadian Pacific Railway line and the coal mine. It was one of the largest landslides in Canadian history and remains the deadliest, as between 70 and 90 of the town’s residents were killed, most of whom remain buried in the rubble. Multiple factors led to the slide: Turtle Mountain’s formation left it in a constant state of instability. Coal mining operations may have weakened the mountain’s internal structure, as did a wet winter and cold snap on the night of the disaster.

Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse.

Thanks. I didn’t see this story before. I’d agree that it’s still relevant and will be for the next decade or so. I gotta disagree with the author’s conclusion that this experience is unique. You don’t see a massive shift in public opinion from a pre-millennialism brand of Christianity towards Augustine’s City of God during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire without contending with the social pathology being unleashed.

The modern secular example would be Mad Max absolutely crushing Tomorrowland at the box office.

We’ve become desensitized to violence to the point where mass murders committed upon innocents are an expected outcome, why would we look askance when push>meets<shove, and such events had become so un-newsworthy as to not even be mentioned anymore by the usual suspects, except in passing?

Oh, I don’t disagree with any of that. I made a comment yesterday about that fact when I said that I thought that the only reason why we heard about the latest shooting was because the body count exceeded the previous record in recent memory.

When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history.
==================================
I agree with you 100% dk. (and not just because your initials match my real name ;)
Probably have never more people been more connected…electronically in history. Yet never before have imho people been so truly disconnected to feel cut adrift from caring human contact.

Yes but the ideal should not to be to care for people like they do in Pakistan or Nigeria (and Mexican immigrants often already do btw) but to care for people like they do in Nordic countries. It’s what a modern industrial well off country does when it’s doing it right. Going back to the mores of a pre-industrial country after post-industrial capitalism isn’t really an option.

In the American Conservative article referencing this commentators pointed out that the stats on school gun shootings are overstated due to including non-violent incidents. The gun nuts so seem to be right on that one.

Before NZ went full tilt boogie capitalism in the later 80’s, after having been a poster child for the cradle to grave socialist state, the Tall Poppy Syndrome would’ve made Peter’s principal rather unwieldy.

Deutsche Bank has a go at explaining US dollar weakness in the face of high and rising US interest rates, which textbook theory says should strengthen the dollar’s attractiveness vs other currencies:

The US twin deficit (the sum of the current account and fiscal balance) is set to deteriorate dramatically in coming years.

When an economy is stimulated at full employment the only way to absorb domestic demand is higher imports. Under conservative assumptions the US twin deficit is set to deteriorate by well over 3% of GDP over the next two years.

Imperial Pacific also hired Shen Yan, a Chinese banker who’d held senior positions at Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, as president. Yan had suffered an alarming career setback in 2011—he was arrested at Hong Kong International Airport for carrying a gun in his backpack—but he had connections, including to David Paterson, the blind former governor of New York, whom Yan had once helped navigate a menu at a Shanghai luncheon. In 2015, Yan persuaded Paterson to join an Imperial Pacific advisory board and make introductions to other political figures.

Paterson delivered, demonstrating just how easy it is to get prominent American government figures to work for an opaque, year-old Chinese casino developer. He quickly got in touch with Ed Rendell, the ex-governor of Pennsylvania. “They wanted some Americans involved in case anything came up with the regulation or legalities,” Rendell told Bloomberg in a 2016 interview. “One of my assistants and I did some research on the internet.” He signed on for $5,000 a month and persuaded Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor, to take the same gig. Louis Freeh, the former FBI director, also became an adviser. Eugene Sullivan, a retired military judge, and James Woolsey, the former CIA director, joined Imperial Pacific’s board of directors.

A familiar cast of characters, easily bought for $5k a month. It would be hilarious if it weren’t a tragic reflection on the health of our democracy.

I reckon that if Capital has no borders, neither should I.
I know a lot of immigrants.(Mexico mostly, but also points south.)
Most are (somewhat miraculously, given the Kafka-esque system) legal, to one degree or another.
Frankly, I’d rather have them as neighbors than just about anybody else I know.
As for hypersurveillance…should coulda, etc,lol.
how would we get it back into the tube?
Sadly, we might need Hypersousveillance to counter it.
which is unpleasant to think about.

The fact that BACE1 inhibitors can remove amyloid plaques again points to Alzheimer’s as being a diabetes of the brain. BACE1 is inhibited by another enzyme called RTN3. Diabetes has been show to loweer the binding of RTN3 to BACE1. The reason that happens is that oxidative stress damages the RTN3 enzyme, like it does with several others. If you are already have weak RTN3 or BACE1 genetics, this oxidative stress makes it more likely you will get Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s is caused by oxidative stress. It is relatively easy to reduce oxidative stress.

Namely, has anyone been studying all the shooters’ parents (or families), looking for economic problems that they all have in common?

Could Mom and Dad working 2 or 3 jobs, never being around, or Mom and Dad being constantly stressed from being a ‘precariat’ (or some other neoliberal malady of your choice). . . could any of that push a kid over the edge?

Again, I’m not saying that’s so; I’m asking, has anyone heard that mentioned by social scientists studying school shootings? Or mentioned in interviews by people who knew the shooters?

A typically cautious male worker is cautious because there is a rather sad history of males dominating and abusing females in the workplace. There are certainly excesses being committed in the name of political correctness, but those who call it excessive are typically not the traditional victims. What is so onerous about being required to have open-door meetings with a female colleague?

I think the bond between people, especially males and females, will be strengthened when women don’t feel threatened.

The history is that women rarely had power in the work place. So the times they are a-changing. Transitions are not overnight.

I just look at things like offices with windows as design solutions to help bridge until a new paradigm settles in.

I work in engineering. There were NO women until around 1990. Interestingly, checking in with women colleagues over the past few months, they report that they have not been sexually harassed except on construction sites, even in the 90s. I was concerned that this may have been going on under the radar – apparently engineers are too boring (civil and ethical?) to do the Weinstein thing. However, they have dealt with a distinct glass ceiling issue with lower pay and opportunities.

White House Says Iraq Has WMD Russia Created Cyberattack Moon of Alabama. What I can’t figure out is why we don’t have our war already, whether in North Korea, the Middle East, or Ukraine, since our elites clearly want one so desperately (I don’t mean pissant wars like Afghanistan; I mean a real war, with tanks ‘n’ stuff, and embedded “reporters”).

That’s the time it takes for the light to hit the retina. Now add in the time it takes for the rod or cone in the retina to fire off a signal, the time for that signal to propagate to the brain, and for the brain to interpret multiple (often ambiguous) signals as an integrated perception of a moving image, and you can probably add another second or two.

The father of nudge theory says Wells Fargo is using “sludge” theory to avoid refunding customers’ money. …

Wells Fargo forcing people to opt in to being paid money they’re owed is “thick sludge,” Thaler said on Twitter.

On Twitter TWTR, -2.50% Thaler was referring to the bank’s method of reimbursing 110,000 customers who were improperly charged monthly fees. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the bank will offer to reimburse those customers by mailing them form letters and asking customers to opt in to a repayment.

The plan quickly caught the eye of behavioral economists, who dubbed it an example of “sludge,” meaning the opposite of nudge theory, which is supposed to harness people’s decision-making instincts to help them make better choices for their well-being. …

Although in all fairness, Thaler, Sunstein and company nudging people into high-fee 401(k)’s
was not necessarily a “better choice for their well-being”.

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

This is a replay of the Republican party’s reflexive protectionism of the early 20th century. Smoot and Hawley’s [both Republicans] tariff act of 1930, signed by one-term Republican president Hoover, teed up the Great Depression. Such was the popular revulsion to the consequences that 20 years would elapse before another Republican was entrusted with the presidency.

History rhymes. If Trade War Trump goes for Ross’s ruination, it will set up a hard smash in 2020 which could make Trump a one-termer as well as end the US’s dark reign as “the world’s only superpower,” as it collapses back into its nativist, know-nothing shell.

Smoot-Hawley signed into law June 1930, eight months after the October stock market plunges. Per Hoover at that time: “Prosperity is just around the corner.” Smoot-Hawley was perfectly timed if you were intent on tanking the economy.

So what’s gonna happen when half the country is uninsurable? Is that when we’ll wake up and say “Oh crap.” Or will it be when the southern half of Florida is underwater? Seems like the insurance industry needs to be shouting very loudly about climate change. Their business model is based on assessing and pricing risk. Their biggest risk seems to be to the business model itself because the prices they will come up with, no one will be able to pay. It will turn out that a stable climate is priceless. Whooda thunk it?

This is asking a lot, but it’s what actually happened in the Thurston High shooting a number of years ago. It’s in Springfield, Oregon, not very far away. I believe it was the football players that rushed him. One of them took a bullet to the head and nearly died, but they subdued the kid and stopped the slaughter.

“Kinkel fired a total of 50 rounds, hitting with 37 of those, and killing two . . . When Kinkel’s rifle ran out of ammunition and he began to reload, wounded student Jacob Ryker tackled him, assisted by several other students. Kinkel drew the Glock from his belt and fired one shot before he was disarmed, injuring Ryker again as well as another student. He yelled at the students, “Just kill me!” The students restrained Kinkel until the police arrived and arrested him.[6] A total of seven students were involved in subduing and disarming Kinkel.”

“Ryker had a perforated lung, but he made a full recovery. He received the Boy Scouts of America Honor Medal with Crossed Palms for his heroism on the day of the attack.”

“Photography and the Philosophy of Time:
On Gustave Le Gray’s Great Wave, Sète”
As a former photographer with some familiarity with the history of the medium, I lost patience with the article very quickly, because it doesn’t acknowledge the technical aspect of the medium. Capturing stopped motion was very difficult early on simply because the sensitive materials were so slow. That odd expression you see in old portraits? That’s because the subject had to hold still for long seconds or even minutes. I have an old family photo that captures the fact: the old lady is in perfect detail, with an expression of grim determination (a lot of my ancestors were like that), and the child she’s holding is blurred beyond recognition. Small children don’t hold still.

“The Great Wave” is a TECHNICAL tour-de-force; he was both very skilled and very lucky, because sensitivity was pretty unpredictable then. The way it was gotten under control was amusing: turned out to matter what the animal sources of the gelatin had been eating. Mustard made the film faster.